Planning and Optimization for Multi-Robot Planetary Cave Exploration under Intermittent Connectivity Constraints

Title	Planning and Optimization for Multi-Robot Planetary Cave Exploration under Intermittent Connectivity Constraints
Authors	Filip Klaesson, Petter Nilsson, Tiago Stegun Vaquero, Scott Tepsuporn and Aaron D. Ames and Richard M. Murray
Source	8th ICAPS Workshop on Planning and Robotics
Abstract	Exploring subsurface structures with autonomous robots is of growing interest in the context of planetary caves studies. Communication between robots in these environments is severely degraded which complicates coordination and information distribution. In this paper we focus on planning for mobility and communication in a cave exploration scenario where the situational awareness of a static base station is critical. We propose a notion of information-consistency where a plan itself is part of the information to be shared between robots, and propose a method for generating informationconsistent plans. We discuss in detail how the resulting plan can be robustly implemented with minimal communication through local mission executives that run on individual robots. We describe preliminary results on the performance of the planning algorithm and integration of the local mission executives in a high-fidelity simulation environment.
Type	Conference paper
URL	https://www.cds.caltech.edu/~murray/preprints/FK+20-icaps.pdf
DOI
Tag	FK+20-icaps
ID	2020c
Funding
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